Win7 UAC tokens

Question

It is known that under win7 UAC you receive 2 tokens when you logon to the system: std user token and admin token.

If I disable UAC, what should I get? only admin token? or still both with no consideration to the UAC status?

Answer 1

Both tokens are still used - what actually happens when you disable UAC is that the prompting process is bypassed and automatic elevation is enabled. If Windows understands that the application needs elevation (e.g. it sees that it's a .msi file or has setup\install in the name amongst other things) it will automatically elevate otherwise you will have to tell it to elevate separately. There's a good article about UAC on Vista by Tim Sneath over on MSDN blogs that explains this, and while the implementation has changed a little on Windows 7 the same principle applies.